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 Course

Master's programme in Teacher Education (120 cp)

English

0441b_m15

  • English Didactics for Primary Schools: Selected Topics

    0441bA1.1
    • 17475 Seminar
      Ausgewählte Themen der Englischdidaktik: A Positive Approach to Language Teaching (GS) (Michaela Sambanis)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: K 31/102 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar introduces Positive Language Pedagogy, a strength-based approach to language teaching inspired by Positive Psychology and child-centered didactics. Participants will explore how concepts such as the PERMA model (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment), growth mindset, and appreciative classroom interaction can support young learners’ emotional well-being, motivation, and language development. The course focuses on playful, age-appropriate activities and routines that help create a warm, encouraging learning environment in the primary English classroom. In addition to supporting pupils, the seminar also highlights the importance of teacher well-being as a foundation for sustainable and joyful teaching. Through a mix of theory, hands-on practice, and reflection, students will develop ideas for implementing positive language education in everyday classroom life.

      Reading recommendation:
      Students are encouraged to read the Happy Learning resource book (Sambanis/Ludwig 2024, Hueber-Verlag) before or during the seminar. The book offers a practical introduction to key concepts of Positive Pedagogy and will be referenced regularly throughout the course. Reading it will support your understanding of the theoretical foundations and provide hands-on ideas for implementing positive practices in the English classroom.

    • 17479 Seminar
      Ausgewählte Themen der Englischdidaktik: Education for Democracy: Supporting Language Learners’ Autonomy (GS/ISS/GYM) (Katja Heim)
      Schedule: Do 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-16)
      Location: 2.2058 Seminarraum (Fabeckstr. 23/25)

      Comments

      What does it imply if we say that we want to support learners’ autonomy? A frequent association is a scene in which every learner works individually, without any help, any bonds and any obligations. That is not what is meant here. Supporting language learners’ autonomy is an aim formulated in the central European document on language learning, the Common European Framework of References for Languages. The concept of autonomy used here is not individualistic but considers learners as members of communities. The aim is thus to develop not only responsibility for learning at an individual level but also responsibility within groups of learners. This aims to enable learners to uphold a democratic Europe, in which citizens interact internationally and engage in peaceful discourse.

      In this course, we will look at strategies for developing language learner autonomy within school-based English lessons and will consider important issues, such as the balance between structure and freedom, types of interactions in class, target language use, assessment, and inclusion.

      Throughout the course, we will connect theory and practice, will analyse lesson sequences, and will develop small-scale action research projects in preparation for your term papers.

      Parts of this course will be taught online. Dates for on-site and online sessions will be announced in class. The first two sessions will be on-site.

  • Specialization Module D2: Literary Studies: Periods - Genres - Concepts

    0546aA1.9
    • 16199 Seminar
      Textanalyse mit R für die Geisteswissenschaften (Lisa Poggel)
      Schedule: Termine siehe LV-Details (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: JK 26/101 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Dieses Seminar vermittelt grundlegende praktische Kenntnisse der Textanalyse mit der Programmiersprache R. Der Fokus liegt auf der Verarbeitung und Analyse geisteswissenschaftlicher Daten. Das Seminar richtet sich insbesondere an Studierende ohne Programmiererfahrung und vermittelt neben Verfahren der Textanalyse und des Text Mining auch Grundlagen der Programmierung mit R. R kommt als besonders einstiegsfreundliche Programmiersprache vermehrt auch in geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschungsprojekten zur Anwendung, beispielsweise bei der quantitativen Textanalyse, in der digitalen Stilometrie, bei der Autorschaftserkennung oder zur Analyse und Visualisierung historischer Korrespondenznetzwerke. Das Seminar setzt keine Programmiererfahrung voraus. Es richtet sich explizit an Studierende aller Institute des Fachbereichs ›Philosophie und Geisteswissenschaften‹.

  • Specialization Module D3: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures

    0546bA1.10
    • 17360 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Writing Abolition (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Between 1700 and 1810 British merchants transported almost three million Africans across the Atlantic for the purposes of chattel slavery – a trade upon which the British economy eventually came to depend. Yet from the middle of the eighteenth century, various abolitionist movements began to speak out against this practice, which they saw as brutal and inhumane. The British had long seen themselves as a people devoted to liberty, and whose spirit was embodied in the rights of the Magna Carta. By the 1780s a wave of abolitionist fervour swept through Britain, led by the Quakers and the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and by 1807 the slave trade had been abolished (although slavery itself was not made illegal in the British Empire until 1833). This course will examine the various discourses of human rights and humanitarian sympathy that emerged at the end of the long eighteenth century in relation to the abolitionist movement. Students will be asked to analyse and compare texts by British abolitionists with those of ex-slaves such as Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince in order to examine debates over civil and religious liberties, forms of cultural exchange, the problem of geographical migration, and conceptions of British nationhood as a land of liberty and equality.

      Students are expected to acquire the following texts:

      • Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings. Any edition.
      • Prince, Mary. The History of Mary Prince. Any edition.

      A course reader will be made available on Blackboard at the beginning of semester.
    • 17361 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Narrating India (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Do 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-16)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)
    • 17362 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Empire and the Globalising Gothic around 1800 (Caroline Kögler)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This course examines the Gothic as a literary mode emerging in tandem with the rapid expansion of European imperial power in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Far from being confined to the haunted castles of a fictionalised Europe, the Gothic became a globalising form, absorbing and refracting anxieties about colonial encounters, the Atlantic slave trade, revolution, and shifting ideas of race, gender, and national identity. We will explore how Gothic fiction negotiated the “otherness” of distant geographies, the fear and fascination of the exotic, and the violent realities of imperialism—often transforming imperial peripheries into the haunted landscapes of the imagination.

      Our intersectional readings will pair canonical Gothic works with novels and narratives shaped by the circulation of people, goods, and ideas across, primarily, the Atlantic and Mediterranean. We will investigate how this globalising Gothic contributed to, and at times critiqued, the cultural logics of empire, drawing on postcolonial theory, transnational literary history, and critical race studies.

      Primary texts include:

      • Anne Radcliffe, The Sicilian Romance (1790)
      • Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
      • Leonora Sansay, Secret History; or, The Horrors of St. Domingo (1808)
      • Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
      • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

      Please note: Gothic novels tend to be long, nevertheless, for your “Aktive Teilnahme,” it is expected that you read all of the texts to be able to chair a discussion and actively participate in discussions.

  • Specialization Module D4: Culture - Gender - Media

    0546bA1.11
    • 17367 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Enlightenment Cosmopolitans (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-13)
      Location: J 32/102 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The eighteenth century was a period in which the expansions of global trade networks and scientific exploration resulted not only in the emergence of modern capitalism, but similarly in the movement of people and cultural artefacts across national and international borders. It was an age in which Europeans developed a fascination for Chinese and East Asian artistic traditions, and in which the travel narrative emerged as the most popular genre of literature next to the novel. Philosophers resurrected the ancient Greek concept of the kosmopolites to refer to citizens of the world, with Christoph Martin Wieland using it in 1788 to define humanity as so many branches of a single tree, and Immanuel Kant proposing a cosmopolitan law as the treatment of individuals as human beings rather than as citizens of the state. At the core of these ideas is that we have obligations to others, and that we take seriously the value of human life, as well as the various practices and beliefs that give these lives significance. Yet whilst most of the English-language narratives of cross-cultural encounter during this period were written by British travellers and voyagers, it was also the case that those from other lands wrote of their experiences in contact with British subjects. This course will compare the writings of eighteenth-century British, Indian, and African cosmopolitans who either narrate an encounter with difference as intercultural exchange or situate that difference within British culture itself. Over the course of the semester, students will be asked to consider to what extent these writers reconceive a cosmopolitan existence as an obligation to human life, and to what extent they imagine and negotiate the various dimensions of intercultural contact, hospitality, globalisation and the emergence of modern capitalism.

      A course reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.

      Students are expected to acquire the following texts:

      • Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Turkish Embassy Letters. Any Edition.
      • Hamilton, Elizabeth. Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Any Edition.
      • Mahomet, Dean. The Travels of Dean Mahomet. Any Edition.
      • Sancho, Ignatius. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. Any Edition.
    • 17368 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Shakespeare's Othello: Text, Stage, Screen (Sabine Schülting)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The course will be concerned with Othello, one of Shakespeare’s most controversial tragedies. It is a play about love and jealousy, but also racism and misogyny. The course will start with a close-reading of the play, its contextualization in early modern debates about gender and race, and an overview of important critical responses to the play. We will then have a look at the stage history of Othello and different approaches to performing Blackness. This will include a consideration of more recent stage productions and film versions. Our discussions of these contemporary interpretations and adaptations of Othello will consider the ways in which the tragedy has been used to address current debates about cultural and racial differences as well as the intersections of gender and race.

      Texts: Students should purchase a scholarly edition of Othello (preferably the Arden, Cambridge or Oxford edition) and have read the play by the beginning of the semester.

      Assessment will be on the basis of regular attendance, active participation in class activities (such as short presentations, group work, short written assignments etc.) and the submission of an essay (of c. 4000 words). Exchange students with a background in English and/or Cultural Studies are welcome; your proficiency in English should be at least B2. Exchange students can get up to 10 ECTS for this course.
    • 17369 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: The British Empire in Film and Fiction (Lukas Lammers)
      Schedule: Fr 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-17)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In this seminar we will study a range of recent films and fiction that represent different phases and aspects of the British Empire. The first few sessions are intended to provide an introduction to three key contexts: empire, memory and media. We will then turn to six fictional representations (three novels and three films) as well as some shorter texts. The materials that we will be discussing span a considerable temporal, geographical, and thematic range. Temporally, they will take us from the heyday of Empire to its decline and beyond; geographically, there will be spotlights on Australia, Botswana, Britain, the Caribbean, India, and Singapore.

      TEXTS
      Novels: Matthew Kneale, English Passengers (2000), Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (2000), Jane Gardam, Old Filth (2004).

      Shorter texts will be made available on Blackboard.

      Films: A United Kingdom (2016, dir. Amma Asante), Victoria and Abdul (2017, dir. Stephen Frears), Small Island (2009, BBC Television, dir. John Alexander)

      ASSESSMENT
      Assessment will be based on short writing assignments, very short presentations in class (‘aktive Teilnahme’), and a final essay of 4.000 words to be submitted after the end of class. Exchange students with a background in English and/or Cultural Studies are welcome; your proficiency in English should be at least B2.

  • Specialization Module D5: Sociolinguistics and Varieties

    0546bA1.12
    • 17371 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Socioling. and Varieties of English: Language and Tourism (Antje Wilton)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: JK 31/125 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In this seminar, we will explore the relationship between (public) language use and the field of tourism. Tourism is a global societal domain in which language serves distinct purposes and manifests itself in a variety of genres and media. We will investigate, for instance, how language is used in transient linguistically and culturally mixed groups of people, how written interpretive infrastructure shapes the linguistic landscape of tourism sites, how language and visual semiotic elements structure gastronomic and medial promotion of touristic offers and how local languages are commodified as an economic resource in tourism. Students will engage more deeply with a topic of their choice in group student sessions, which they will plan and conduct themselves.

      One highlight of the course will be a short joint COIL project on historic tourism sites with students and their lecturer from the German department of the University of Minnesota, Duluth. More information about this specific form of virtual cooperation can be found here: https://becoil.de/.

      Please note that some knowledge of German is required for this course.

  • Specialization Module D6: Structure of English

    0546bA1.13

  • Specialization Module D7: Semantics and Pragmatics

    0546bA1.14
    • 17376 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning and Context (Ferdinand von Mengden)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-13)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      That linguistic expressions (words, utterances) have a meaning seems to be a very natural thing to assume. How else would it be possible to communicate successfully by means of linguistic expressions? But what exactly is meaning? What does it mean for an expression to ‘have’ a meaning? And how do expressions actually acquire their meaning?

      We can argue that linguistic expressions must have some meaning prior to us speakers using them – otherwise, how could we use them reasonably if we didn’t know what a word can be used for? But this approach doesn’t explain where a word meaning comes from in the first place. We could also argue that we create the meaning of an expression the moment we use it. But how exactly does this work and how do we know which expressions we can or cannot use in a given situation?

      The main aim of this seminar will be to resolve this paradox. A crucial factor in determining the meaning of an expression will be the clues which the context provides in each specific communication. The class therefore focuses on the act of generating meaning during the interaction of people who communicate with each other. How do the speakers’ intentions, their assumptions, and the environment shape the semantic patterns? And how do these spread across a larger community of speakers?

      Students who wish to participate in the class but cannot come in the first week, are kindly asked to notify me via email before the start of the lecture period.

  • Specialization Module D8: Language Change

    0546bA1.15
    • 17381 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Language Change: Emergent Grammar (Ferdinand von Mengden)
      Schedule: Fr 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-17)
      Location: JK 31/124 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      There have been various approaches for explaining how linguistic structures come about – how and why they vary and change. This class will approach this question from the perspective of system theory. The notion 'Emergent Grammar’ is derived from the idea that systems of any kind can be dynamic, fluid as well as open and adaptive. ‘Dynamic’ and ‘fluid’ means that they are never stable at any point and yet retain their functionality. ‘Open’ and ‘adaptive’ means that the system is in exchange with its environment, i.e. with factors and impulses that are themselves not part of the system.

      What exactly does this mean when we want to study and understand how human language functions? How do expressions, their meaning and the grammar behind them come into being, vary, disappear, and yet obviously show enough resilience for enabling communication across generations of people? Rather than looking at cognitive processes of individual speakers in isolation, this seminar will focus on social systems as models for understanding the dynamic systematicity of human language. What are the complex and subtle ways in which social conventions interact with individual needs in communication? How does the complex feedback loop work between individual behavior, social conventions and the environment in which we communicate with each other?

      Those who wish to participate but cannot come to the first class are kindly asked to notify me via email before the beginning of the lecture period.

  • Specialization Module D1: Modernity and Alterity in the Literatures of Medieval Britain

    0546bA1.8
    • 17351 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Abandoned Women (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Di 08:00-10:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-14)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Observing that the word abandonment connotes being exiled or an outcast as well as being shameless or outside the law, Lawrence Lipking observes that “the poetry of abandonment tends to touch on the limits of what is permitted or what is repressed in ordinary, comfortable life” (Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition [U Chicago P, 1988], xii). Female abandonment is a topos in western European literatures, one that resonates with contemporary concerns within feminism/gender/queer studies as well as postcolonial theory. In this course, we will revisit the depiction of abandoned women in classical, medieval and post-medieval literature—within the mentioned theoretical frameworks.

      Coursework will ensue in three stages. At the beginning of the semester, we will discuss Ovid’s Heroides (in translation), before we shall move on to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women to see how a medieval English writer engaged with female abandonment. Towards the end of the semester, we will study a few (shorter) poems about abandoned women in Romantic, Victorian and contemporary literatures in English to assess the differences and similarities in the depiction of abandonment across the period divide between ‘the medieval’ and ‘the modern.’

      Student should be familiar with Ovid’s Heroides by the beginning of the semester:
    • 17352 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Appropriating the Medieval Past: The Political Middle Ages in Literary and Cultural Discourse (Peter Löffelbein)
      Schedule: Mi 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-15)
      Location: KL 32/202 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The Middle Ages keep playing an important role in the cultural imagination of the modern (Western) world. Literary and cultural productions – from video games to TV series and fantasy literature – continue to return to the Middle Ages as modernity’s Other, alternately casting them as a ‘Dark Age’ of cruelty, ignorance and superstition, or as an idealized era of authenticity and social cohesion.

      Inevitably, these conceptions carry ideological implications concerning social identities, societal dynamics, and the body politic. Conversely, political discourse has long been using and abusing the Middle Ages and their representation in literature and culture: the most telling cases include the 19th-century formation of national identities, the Chartist movement for social reform, fascist ideologies, and contemporary debates surrounding neo-feudalism and techno-feudalism.

      In this seminar, we will examine the political dimensions of the Middle Ages in literary and cultural discourse, including the appropriation of ‘the medieval’ in political discussions past and present. By discussing literary texts, select other forms of cultural production, and political analyses, students shall become familiar with historical and contemporary manifestations of medievalism and learn to analyse its incidental and strategic uses in various discursive fields.

  • Specialization Module D2: Literary Studies: Periods - Genres - Concepts

    0546bA1.9
    • 17354 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Shakespeare's Histories (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-15)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)
    • 17355 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Odysseys (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Mo 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-13)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      While the western European classics may not generally seem to be important reference points for contemporary writers, the Odyssey—either in its entirety or by way of individual episodes—has become an important intertext for recent novels and films. In this seminar, we shall investigate how different recent adaptations engage with the classical nostos epic. During the semester, we will discuss the following reworkings of Homer’s Odyssey: Ethan Coen and Joel Coen’s film O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005), and Amor Towles’s The Lincoln Highway (2021). Students should be familiar with Homer’s Odyssey by the beginning of the semester; I recommend Emily Wilson’s recent (paperback) verse translation (Norton, 2018), but there are countless other translations available, some of them online.

      This seminar is very reading-intensive!
    • 17356 Specialization Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Literature and Ecology in the Early Modern World (Katrina Spadaro)
      Schedule: Do 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-10-16)
      Location: KL 29/207 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      While forests and pastures once served as the bedrock of an early modern “green” criticism, recent scholarship focuses on a much vaster colour spectrum - including blue waterways, frosty arctic landscapes, ominous grey skies and the sedimented hues of stone. This course gives you an overview of how such diverse ecosystems, natural features, and meteorological events fuelled a powerful, and often anxious, early modern imaginary. Over the course of the semester, we will contextualise familiar early modern texts within an intellectual climate that was highly attuned to contemporary ecological changes and pressures (including coal pollution, deforestation, rapid urban development, and the “Mini Ice Age”) and which associated different modes and genres of writing with a rich variety of natural environments.

  • Modules w/o courses in this semester

    7 Modules
    • Specialization Module D3: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures 0546aA1.10
    • Specialization Module D4: Culture - Gender - Media 0546aA1.11
    • Specialization Module D5: Sociolinguistics and Varieties 0546aA1.12
    • Specialization Module D6: Structure of English 0546aA1.13
    • Specialization Module D7: Semantics and Pragmatics 0546aA1.14
    • Specialization Module D8: Language Change 0546aA1.15
    • Specialization Module D1: Modernity and Alterity in the Literatures of Medieval Britain 0546aA1.8